Or why you should be shouting from the rooftops on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. (Whether you’re having a sale or not.)

We’re just eight days away from the start of Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, and rather than giving you tips for how to have a successful sale or promote your online store that weekend, I want to address the elephant in the room.

As an artist or maker who is in tune with the problems and injustices of the world, participating in Black Friday probably makes you feel a little icky. After all, Black Friday does represent many of the worst impulses of consumerism. And that icky feeling may make you want to just curl into a ball for the entire weekend.

But I want to stop you right there.

Because instead of hiding during Black Friday/Cyber Monday, I want you to shout about your work from the rooftops. (Or at the very least, I want you to email your damn list!! Because that’s actually better than shouting into the void on social media.)

Now, before we go any further, I’m not telling you that you need to run a sale next weekend. There are pros and cons to running a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale and you should decide for yourself if it’s right for you. (You can read this post that I wrote about it a few years back here on why you might want to have a sale, though full disclosure, I’m not running a sale on my jewelry this year, mostly because I just ran a really big sample sale in September.)

But what I am telling you is that, regardless of whether you’re running a sale or not, I don’t want you to hide. I want you to get out there (metaphorically speaking, of course, we are still in a pandemic) and share your art and how awesome it is.

That’s because the antidote to consumerism is art.

Hear me out on this one, because I’m sure that you’re thinking that the antidote to consumerism is minimalism, or not consuming at all. But I actually don’t believe that.

If you look at the history of our species, it’s clear we like stuff. Museums are filled with gorgeous artifacts from our earliest days. And those are just the things that survived and were deemed worthy of preserving. And yes, I know that museums are deeply colonial institutions that stole a lot of their artifacts. But that’s not my point.

My point is that, as a people, we love stuff. (And museums are simply proof of that.) We love to adorn ourselves and surround ourselves with beautiful objects. And that love vastly predates our modern society. It predates capitalism. And it very much predates the excessive consumer culture we live in now.

We love stuff so much, that even in the midst of a global pandemic and the worst economic crises most of us have ever experienced, people are still going to be spending lots and lots of money this Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.

People are going to be buying presents for loved ones they won’t get to see in person, sprucing up their homes for a long winter of staying in, finding things to wear on Zoom gatherings or at small family get-togethers, or simply treating themselves for making it this far this year.

And that’s where you come in.

As an artist or maker, your job is to remind people that there’s an alternative to all that mass-produced crap they could buy. Your job is to let people know that you’ve got beautiful things, made by a real person, that will legitimately make people happier.

And this conversation should not be limited to Small Business Saturday or Art Sunday. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday (and really, all year long), we artists and makers need to be sharing our work and the work of our peers.

We need to share and be proud of the work that we’re selling, because at the end of the day, people are going to spend money next weekend. So why shouldn’t the money they spend be with us?